


the remains of our sky

by traiyadhvika



Category: South Park
Genre: Character Study, Future Fic, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 09:32:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15860952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traiyadhvika/pseuds/traiyadhvika
Summary: Clyde dies in a mountaineering accident.You had read about it somewhere before, the thing about giving up your dead to the mountains. Returning the body to nature for the birds. Recycling at its finest.It doesn't happen much anymore, you know.But that hadn't stopped you from dreaming that night: the sun burning through your retinas, the faraway caw of ravens, the vultures above you honing in slowly, slowly...





	the remains of our sky

**Author's Note:**

> kinda nervous about posting this because it's at once a subject matter intensely close to me but also, i set out to write with a very particular image in mind... not sure if i managed it, but i wanted to try anyhow, and i think it turned out okay.
> 
> this is written from craig's pov, both past and present. i hope you enjoy.

You remember the pebbles battering against your window at midnight, the flashlight, the strum of a guitar that you know will soon become a yowling cacophony if you do not answer its call fast enough. That was near twenty years ago, and today when you open your window there is nothing but snow. _Snow-capped peaks_ , you think, and you shut out the icy wind before it stings your eyes again.

(You think of a wide wide smile.)

From your sister you hear Red is home for a spell, after a tumultuous five years in Los Angeles. You see her at the funeral and not before; she doesn’t look you in the eye when everyone files out of the funeral home one by one. It is not a family issue, because neither does anyone else.

News travels fast in a small town. You’d almost forgotten it was this way, even when you thought you’d escaped long ago.

(You thought he had gotten away, too, and in a way he had: there was nobody in the casket, and there will still be nobody when you lower it into the ground come spring.)

You will never bring him home, and you had known that the moment you walked away from him last summer.

 

＊

 

It started as a joke when you were nine.

(As do all things, when you start seeing them for what they are.)

You were a skinny knobbly thing, and he the opposite, and you’d been laughing at him trying to climb up your garage roof. A paper airplane bumped against his head, knocking him off-balance: _bet you can’t get up here._

“Bet I can,“ he said, red-faced, and the next moment you saw him fall down backwards. You’d raced downstairs to make sure he wasn’t unconscious, knowing that he wasn’t, but the thought stayed in your head all the same.

Once outside, you were met with a snowball to the face.

“I’ll show you,” he yelled, hiding behind a snowbank and already readying another mound. “I’ll climb the highest mountain in the world!”

“No you won’t,” you said, sticking out your tongue. You’d seen that movie recently, where all you remembered before falling asleep in the theater was wind and snow and someone crying. “That’s stupid.“

“Yes I will!”

The second snowball never left; you tackled him into the snow, and your mother had yelled at both of you, and that was that.

 

＊

 

You see Kevin in Skeeter’s, where you hadn’t wanted to come. Your sister will not leave you alone, as if she senses something you can’t—as if she thinks, laughably, you too will break into a thousand pieces. She sits across from you, fiddling with her phone. It’s her last winter in college, and there are better things to do than babysit her older brother.

Kevin’s not crying anymore. You don’t say a thing until he finds your gaze from across the room. You never talked to him much in school, but you don’t hate him.

(He’d always been Clyde’s friend more so than yours. Most people had.)

“Oh, you still have friends,“ Tricia says, when she sees him. She then furrows her brows and leaves, and Kevin slides in to say _hello, hi, how are you?_ But the shape of his lips say _how much do you miss him?_

_How much time do you have left?_

“I’m going back on Monday,“ you say, and it’s not a lie unless a blizzard forces the airport close again, a very real possibility. You have things waiting for you outside of this town: your cozy 9-5, Stripe #21, an otherwise empty apartment.

Your mother had told you to stay as long as you like, here. You had never told her about Clyde, about the words you exchanged and those you didn’t, but the door had always been open. You have always been grateful in the end, you suppose.

(You don’t know if you can stay, is all.)

 

＊

 

When you were fourteen you heard his name on local radio. And then there they were, your friends crowding up on your door excitedly telling you to tune in—nothing ever happened in this tiny pissant town, and you’d liked it that way, you once thought.

You listened his voice and thought about how you missed him every day he was away in Alaska.

(You missed the pebbles on your windowsill and the muddy footprints on your lawn, but you’re a big boy now, and those things were meant to be kept far far away, in memories.)

He came home with new gear— _I conquered Denali and all I got was this stupid shirt!_ which he promptly distributed to anyone who would take it. You pointed out somewhat snidely that defeated the purpose of him wearing it; he laughed and told you to not be a wet blanket.

When you tried it on in the privacy of your own home it was the first time you realized how broad his shoulders were becoming, how the space between the cheap fabric seemed to be missing another person.

 

＊

 

You aren’t surprised to see Bebe at the mall. It is, after all, a small town, with absolutely nothing to offer to its returnees. You are more surprised to see she is not with your cousin.

“What, you think we’re joined at the hip?”

She looks the same as the last time you saw her (before the service), when she crashed at your place two summers ago after a long work trip overseas. You ask if she wants to grab a bite to eat; she asks you to go outside.

“Why?“

“Take a walk with me,” she says simply, and you know better than to refuse her. It is not so blindingly cold today, and so it takes you less time than usual to deduce the direction of where you’re headed. “Don’t run away.“

“Why are we going there.”

“Red’s worried about you,” Bebe replies, swinging her hand and yours. Somehow you’ve joined hands along the way, and hers are warm. You say nothing more as she leads you to the cemetery and pushes open the unlocked gates.

Next to Betsy Donovan’s headstone there is another squared-off plot. The ground is yet too hard for casket or marker, but someone has laid flowers there already, and a child’s baseball glove you recognize from long ago. Bebe’s fingers tighten around yours, and you wonder if she will cry.

(She’d been the first person Clyde had told after the fact, and then several times before and after that, because he had never been able to keep his mouth shut.)

“I’m not going to cry,” she says. She hadn’t at the funeral, after all.

The flowers are daisies, yellow and white. You wonder idly where they had come from, if Roger Donovan had put them there, or if Bebe had, or if you had, in a dream. You let Bebe lay her head on your shoulder, her sobs masked by the sound of passing cars, as a light snow starts to drift once more.

 

＊

 

By the time you were eighteen Clyde had already dropped out of school, managing to finish three more of the seven summits in that time. You kept in touch online, over games, and sometimes when he was home he would knock on your door, and everything would be fine, for a while.

You’d never been able to understand why someone would want to risk so much for so little, but the light in his eyes at every story he recounted gave you something new to look forward to.

(Once, he told you what he saw on a trip to Tibet: that thing about giving up your dead to the mountains, returning the body to nature for the birds to eat. You called it recycling at its finest, but he didn’t laugh.

“You see a lot of shit up there,” he said. In a span of seconds you felt he was somehow much older, the muscles of his body pulled taut as he leaned back into the boxes you were readying for college. He looked blankly at the floor, taking in a sharp breath. You looked at his body, so different from when you were children, and you thought about vultures, honing in slowly, slowly. “I saw a man die in front of me, Craig. He just…he just _fell_ , and I never saw him—”

And then you were cradling him in your arms, knowing nothing but the tears wetting your collar, and because the words were lodged so deeply in your throat you just held and held and never let go until morning.)

 

＊

 

Not everyone came back. you don’t blame them; most people your age have lives of their own now, wrapped up in work and friends and relationships away from their collective childhood nightmare.

You email your boss and ask for another two days off, citing illness. Then you go outside, taking Tricia’s car (she won’t miss it today) and you go to Denver, snow be damned.

In a Starbucks downtown you run into Tweek. It’s almost funny, you think, that you find him here. He’s scruffier than you remember, and he’s working the shift alone.

“Oh, hey,” he mutters, a little awkwardly when he sees you. “Sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday.”

(You’d seen some of Clyde’s climbing mates at the service, people who do not know your name but must have some recollection of your face from the looks they threw your way. It’s the same kind of look Tweek’s giving you now, like he knows something he won’t say, and you taste the bitter grounds rising up in the back of your throat.)

You feel a vibration in your pocket: it’s Jimmy, and he says he’ll be ready soon.

“It doesn’t matter,” you say as you take your order. “Are you coming?”

Tweek looks out the window, at the inches of snow piling up against the sidewalk and windows, and shakes his head.

“Not today,” he says, sadly. You feel his eyes on you as you walk out, but they do not implore you to stay.

 

＊

 

Clyde never told the world about you, big mouth or no, but the year you both turned twenty-three he asked to move some of his things to your place. To have somewhere to come back to, he explained: he didn’t want to have to go back to South Park every time he returned, and he was sick of hotel food.

“What a problem to have,” you told him, but you let him stay anyway. You didn’t know what to call the arrangement then, crunching numbers during the day and fighting the nasty Bay Area traffic home to make love to him if he was there, or Netflix if he wasn’t.

(Sometimes you still thought about the vultures, and you felt cold even with his body next to yours.)

When you were younger you thought he’d be a football star, something less lonely. You’ve stopped asking why he climbs, why the calluses on his hands are a permanent fixture, why you sometimes woke up in the middle of the night to find him sitting on the couch, staring at nothing.

 _In the clouds you are alone_ , Clyde had told you before. You wondered, without wanting to know if it were true, if he did it so he had something to come home to.

You supposed you loved him, then.

 

＊

 

You drive in moderate silence; Token sits next to you, and Jimmy dozes off in the back.

He is also the first to break the silence, later: “Stop the car.”

They pull off the highway, stopping in front of a gas station. Token opens his mouth, but Jimmy, as always, gets there first.

“W-why are you acting like this?“

“Like what?” Silence. Sweat builds up under your fingers on the steering wheel. You feel the atmosphere shifting into something sharp: _had it always been like this?_ “Like _what?_ ”

Jimmy touches your shoulder. “Like…like we aren’t here.”

“Keep driving,“ Token says, ending the conversation before you could ask Jimmy what that means, why you refuse to understand. It takes you near three hours to get to White River, through increasingly heavy snow and terrible traffic. The notice at the entrance tells you the forest is closed due to inclement weather. Without a word you get out of the car, go to the trunk, and open it.

Token comes to stand next to you. “We should leave.”

“No.”

“Craig, the park’s _closed_ , we can’t—”

“I’ll go up myself,“ you say, turning to him. You see his eyes widen, and the rest of your words, so hot on your tongue just a second before, freeze. “I—“

Token looks at you, and you look back, the snowflakes falling around you in slow motion. An eternity later, his fist comes swinging down.

Later, when you’re back in the car, the sting is less apparent on your cheek than in his words: “We’re not letting you go anywhere alone.”

 

＊

 

On some level you must’ve known it would’ve come to this, because you loved him or because you loved yourself more, and that there was nothing you feared more than to have the world you know pulled out from beneath your feet, sending you tumbling to the ravines below.

Clyde had slipped during the final training for his solo climb a month back, on some nameless hill whose name you could barely pronounce, and the state you found him in the hospital was enough to convince you of what you’d always been wanting to tell him.

So you did, once he was home with you.

He called you selfish; you called it practical.

( _“I’ll show you,”_ he said, in earnest or in anger, a curse you cannot escape. You had thrown the hospital papers in his face and told him it was you or the mountain, and that was that.)

And so, you watched him go.

 

＊

 

(“It’s not your fault,” Token says, gently, firmly. “It wasn’t.”

The wind howling outside is nothing; the blizzard, nothing. You look up and see wetness in the corners of his eyes, and Jimmy puts a hand over both of yours in silence. In your mind is a field of prayer flags, the faint rumble of thunder, and his smile more blinding than white snow.

You had never once wanted to prove anything in your quiet, boring life, but this time you prove them wrong.

You cry.)

 

＊

 

You had never liked having your photo taken, and despite it there were hundreds in his phone, photos of him dabbing behind you or making faces with you or impressionistic whirls of color from when you’d chased him through the living room. Clyde never deleted anything from his photo roll, and now that he would never again be in a position to do it, you opened the package that had been sent to you, from a woman whose name is a familiar echo.

 _In the clouds you are alone_. Clyde’s phone was all the Czech team, which had come across him while summitting, could manage to bring down with them.

(You did not think about vultures anymore.)

It was like breathing, almost: waiting for the screen to load, mindlessly tapping in the numbers comprising your birthday, being let in, and belatedly realizing what that meant.

The file that you saw first on his home screen was named _te amo, pata._

 _If you’re seeing this,_ you read, _I’m probably dead, huh?_

_But don’t you dare cry for me, asshole.  
_

 

＊

 

_“I wanted to prove something to myself.”_

Today is your twenty-seventh birthday. When the weather subsides the next day all of you crowd into Token’s van and head towards Mount Lincoln, the country landscape giving away to never-ending pine trees, a soft jazz number mumbling on the radio.

“I don’t think…we won’t get caught right? Like there won’t be anybody—”

Red nudges him. “You know we’ve done way worse, Tweek.”

“I bought biodegradable paper,” Token says as he takes the next exit.

“Oh, good.”

You do not go to the top; that is for another day, when the chain-linked fences come down, when the snow isn’t so deep. The seven of you make it up to a flat overlook, where you can clearly see the valley and the frozen lake below.

Jimmy takes out the box in the trunk. “L-let’s start folding.”

Kevin and Tweek make the neatest airplanes, you notice: crisp edges and sharp points and all. Jimmy argues with the girls over the colored paper, and Token folds in companionable silence next to you. It is cold, but the sun is hovering high, and that’s more than what you could’ve hoped for.

When there is no more paper Bebe looks up to scan the horizon, pointing to the forest below. “There?”

You look: the cry of an osprey catches your attention, and you see the bird swooping down low over the treetops, vanishing for a second, and then resurfacing to circle the skies above your heads. You wonder how high something like that could fly, if it could fly forever.

“Yes,” you say, smiling.

Some of the planes are lost to the wind the moment you let go, carried backwards or high into the crevices of rocks and snow. Some of them fall only a short distance below, stuck in sparse winter brush. You watch red and yellow and green flutter down the mountain and into the valley, all seemingly an arm’s throw away. And you remember the last roll of pictures in the phone, the eternally snow-capped peaks near colorful Kathmandu, the excitement on Clyde’s face as he'd pointed towards the sky.

It had been blue. You throw your last airplane to the wind, watching it glide higher, higher, but you don’t stay to see it land.

**Author's Note:**

> i will leave y'all with [this two-parter bbc article](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151008-the-tragic-story-of-mt-everests-most-famous-dead-body) (warning for death and graphic content) that largely inspired this fic.
> 
> edit 9/28/18: now with some [INCREDIBLE accompanying art](https://dio-roga.tumblr.com/post/178483425969/and-you-remember-the-last-roll-of-pictures-in-the) by dio-roga! thank you so, so much ;_; <3


End file.
